Gardening Quotes

If I didn't believe that we had a chance of coming to power, then I would have focused on taking care of my three children or gardening.

When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.

One of the greatest virtues of gardening is this perpetual renewal of youth and spring, of promise of flower and fruit that can always be read in the open book of the garden, by those with an eye to see, and a mind to understand.

Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening.

I love old gardens best- tired old garden that rest in the sun.

The market is the best garden.

I believe in gardening the soil as well as the soul.

My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.

A garden always has a point.

I now derive physical and spiritual pleasure from gardening and there is tremendous satisfaction in knowing that I could survive almost anywhere if I had to.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

I have spoken to plants myself, and if pressed for conclusions would have to say that those I threatened did better than those I - well, I wouldn't say prayed over, but pleaded with, cajoled. A rhododendron that hadn't bloomed for six years was flatly told it would be removed the following year if there were no flowers. Need I say that it has bloomed profusely ever since?

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Gardening has a magical quality when you are a child.

Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.

Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of nature with which she indicates how much she loves us.

May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true.

No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff.

Sometimes my courage fails me and I think I ought to stop working, live in the country and devote myself to gardening. But I am held by a thousand bonds, and I don't know when I shall be able to arrange things otherwise. Nor do I know whether, even by writing scientific books, I could live without the laboratory.

It would never occur to most of us that 'plants' say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life.

When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected, and have cost only a little more than you had planned.

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps.

Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.

I also know that we must cultivate our garden. For when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest.

If you want to be happy for a short time, get drunk happy for a long time, fall in love; happy forever, take up gardening.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

Gardening gloves are for sissies. I always have dirt under my nails.

The real lowdown on gardening is ... dirt.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden.

People who take the time to be alone usually have depth, originality, and quiet reserve.

I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.

In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

We must cultivate our own garden.

In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

We belong to no cult. We are not Nature Lovers. We don't love nature any more than we love breathing. Nature is simply something indispensable, like air and light and water, that we accept as necessary to living, and the nearer we can get to it the happier we are.

Spirituality is like a bird: If you hold it too closely, it chokes, And if you hold it too loosely, it escapes.

I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.

All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her. The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.

Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy.

marrows - alas! - are arriving in a steady stream at the back door. ... Oddly enough, the majority of people who grow them in Fairacre say, as they hand them over: 'Funny thing! I don't care for them myself. In fact, none of the family likes them!' But still they plant them. It must be the fascination of seeing such a wonderful return for one small seed, that keeps marrow-growers at their dubious task.

While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music.

There are many tired gardeners but I've seldom met old gardeners. I know many elderly gardeners but the majority are young at heart. Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized. The one absolute of gardeners is faith. Regardless of how bad past gardens have been, every gardener believes that next year's will be better. It is easy to age when there is nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, gardeners, however, simply refuse to grow up.